I’ve soft spot for a reserved, intelligent guy –Chimamanda Adichie opens up
By HENRY AKUBUIRO (ifeanyi_mcdaniels@yahoo.com)
Sunday, January 14, 2007 (Courtesy :The Sunnewsonline.com)
The Sunday afternoon is eerily somnolent in the neighbourhood. The harmattan breeze speaks in monotones, etching a mini haze of moistness across the Ilupeju skyline. No droning traffic. No juvenile bustle. Wending footfalls echo like applause and the occasional burring of cell phones sound like an alarm.
Primly dressed in a green native gown, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie banters genially at her auntie’s house in the neighbourhood, where we are meeting, knocking my socks off with unwonted humility. She loops herself in a cushion, bristling in anticipation of the rescheduled chat.
The author sits pretty on contemporary Nigerian literature, and doesn’t make bones about her talent. Her latest work, Half of a Yellow Sun, is a novel on Biafra. She has never hidden her love for her roots. At 16, she wrote a play entitled For Love of Biafra and followed it up with short stories, “That Harmattan” “Morning”, “Half of Yellow Sun”, and “Ghosts”. She felt that she had to approach the huge subject in small oblique ways first before starting the novel itself.
“I think there should be much more writing on Biafra considering how huge and central Biafra was,” she says in a fast tempo dulcet tone. “One of the things I hear the most from Nigerian readers who have read this book is how surprised they were that these things [atrocities] happened in the country in the 1960s and they had no idea. If people in my generation are saying this, then there is much to be told.”
To write the book, Adichie embarked on an extensive research, but she did not use half of what she got. “If I didn’t use half of what I got, that means there is still much for people to write,” she says. Sadly, the author lost two grandparents during the Nigeria-Biafra war.
“Maybe this is my history as well. I wanted to honour my grandfathers, people I’ve heard so much about, and it is really sad that I didn’t get to meet them. I wanted to, also, honour the memories of all the people who died during the period. You hear about something, but, in some ways, you wanted to take ownership of the period – that’s what I wanted to do.”
One of the most difficult things facing a writer is to turn the facts gathered in a research into fiction. When she was writing Half of a Yellow Sun, she pondered on these: how could she make the novel a story about human beings and not about the events of the war, in the end? How could she make it a fiction that somebody who doesn’t have any interest or knowledge about Biafra would read the book and still understand the human story?
Adichie responds to my questions swiftly, her face creasing with smiles from time to time, and she is never cloying in her gesticulations. In a country where the word tribalist is often used, isn’t she afraid that she might be called a tribalist? “The way the word is used in Nigeria sickens me,” she replies. “We don’t realize that colonialism has so brainwashed us that we are happy to say we are detribalized. Detribalized means that you don’t belong to a tribe or a group and you have no identity. There is a difference between being a bigot (and having prejudice) and having cultural pride, which I think everybody should have. But what colonialism has done to us and the way we are educated in this country is that everything in our history and culture is seen as bad and we are not encouraged to be proud of who we are,” she laments.
“I am deeply interested in where I come from. I am very interested in my sense of identity and in my culture. I want to learn as much as I can, particularly about pre-colonial Nigeria. And when you start to talk about it and people say you are no longer Nigerian, it is rubbish. Nigerians shouldn’t be using words like tribalist and detribalized. I think Nigerians should appreciate culture. For example, being Igbo, for me, is something to be proud of,” she declares blightly.
Her Igboness doesn’t stop her interest in other ethnic groups in the country. She is interested in learning Hausa language, the Nok art and the wonderful rituals of the Yoruba. “People have told me that I am not pro-Biafran enough in the book, but the point is that I am interested in telling the truth. Although this is the book that has Biafran sympathies, it is, also, a book that says that Biafra wasn’t perfect, that this idea on Biafra being a dreamland wasn’t a reality.”
As opposed to making up a setting, Adichie has stuck to real-life setting in her two novels. Places like Abba and Nsukka, for example, can easily be located in eastern Nigeria. “I find out that I am not interested when things are set in fictional places. I think setting fiction in a town that is real is more work, because you are obligated to get the details right,” she says softly.
Adichie chuckles for a moment when I ask her why Richard the British in Half of a Yellow Sun claims to be a Biafran but doesn’t take up arms to fight. “He fought for Biafra in a different way. He fought for the course with his pen in the way he could have,” she explains.
Asked why she included some real-life characters, like Gowon, Ojukwu and Nzeogwu, in the novel, she replies that “they were larger than life in that period”, particularly Ojukwu. To write the Biafran story from the point of view of ordinary people and not engage with the spectacle of Ojukwu would be difficult, for he was elevated, says Adichie. “He almost became a demi-god for many people. I was interested in looking at the different ways he was seen. There are people who adored him and those who wanted him dead. I wanted to explore all that, because I think it also plays into the psyche of what it meant to be a Biafran.”
As an individual, does she admire Ojukwu? “That’s a funny question,” she laughs, looking askance at me. “You can only admire somebody you know; I have never met him. But I think Ojukwu is demonized. Like most leaders, he made good and bad choices. I am not in the camp of people who say he is a terrible man. The same goes for Gowon. I am not interested whether somebody was good or bad, evil or not evil – Iam interested in the choices they made, and what they could have done differently.”
The award-winning author would like the new book to open a conversation about our history and the war. “When you say Biafra, some people would say, ‘Oh those Igbo people who want their own country!’, and nobody asks how did Biafra come about. I am hoping that people read the book and realize that a grave injustice has been done to Igbo people; it has to be acknowledged.”
On the level of language, Adichie sticks to code mixing and code switching in Half of a Yellow Sun, just as in Purple Hibiscus. The author admits that hers is a generation that is bilingual and she cannot but recapture the everyday dictum. “It is sort of reminding readers that there is a discourse going on between the two languages (English and Igbo). We are always navigating two languages. Of course, we are taught to elevate one and demonize the other.”
On why she constantly reflects history and culture in her works, she says, “I see myself as a perpetual student, who wants to learn everyday on history and culture of my people and the world in general,” chuffed at herself.
At 29, the author has attained a level of success, winning international awards and having her works translated into some European languages. She is usually surprised when people ask her how she handles her fame. “Which fame?” she asks me wide-eyed, but joshingly. Adichie is noted for her self-effacing attitude. “I don’t think about it too much and I am not consciously aware of it. I feel grateful that am doing what I love. Writing is what makes me happy. I am happy that people are reading me and editors want me to write for them.”
“Oh goodness!” she screams to my loony question whether her fame doesn’t scare away men from her, given the peculiar Nigerian environment where accomplished women are dreaded. “It’s not my problem,” she says. “First of all, I think it’s very important for people to know that those men who are scared by women who are accomplished are the kind of men accomplished women don’t want. So, it’s nobody’s loss,” she sniggers for a while. “It’s a question of confidence and respect, because I think that, if those men really respected women, there is no reason to be put off by a woman who is accomplished. I think it is a shame.”
Adichie calls herself daddy’s child, and she adores her father like no other man. Her father, therefore, comes close to being what her ideal man should be. “He is quiet, reserved and intelligent,” she extols silently and, raising the decibels of her voice, says, “I don’t like men who are loud. When a man is loud, somehow it means that there is confidence that is lacking and so he is trying to make up for it. My father deeply respects women, and I like men like that,” she intones nostalgically. Her father was the former vice-chancellor of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.
“I am a feminist. I am a happy feminist,” she reiterates, her eyes glistening with passion. “Women are marginalized, and we need to right it. I have always said that sometimes it is the women themselves who have been brainwashed to hold themselves down, and the only way we can get away from this is feminism. I think women should be educated on what it means to be a feminist, that we should help other women. I think my work is very feminist. It is just that I like subtlety. I don’t like it when things are too obvious. Fiction that is too obvious is poor fiction,” she notes with lambency.
Adichie is not comfortable with the sententious argument that Nigerian writers who write about Nigeria from the West aren’t writing realistic literature about the country. “If a Nigerian writer leaves the country for Burkina Faso, for instance, and writes from there, nobody will say the same thing about him. I think the resentment is because they think we are privileged in the US. But I think writers should be judged by what they have written and not where they live,” she echoes.
Her choice of titles for her novels, Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun, shows a symbolic predilection. “I am never aware of a conscious desire for symbolic titles,” she says. “On the level of technique, I am interested in imagery and details, as opposed to philosophical function, and very easily imagery becomes symbolic. I feel that the minute you are focused on details, it easily becomes symbolic, even when, as a writer, you don’t intend it to be.”
The writer doesn’t like prescriptive criticism. “A writer should be allowed to let his or her talent go where it wants to go. Most writers don’t actually choose; their subjects choose them. We shouldn’t be prescriptive in literature.” She will be appearing on “Richard and Judy Book Club”, a BBC Channel 4 book programme in March, in London, this year, as the Writer of the Month, where she will read from one of her works and answer questions. She hopes this would help her book penetrate the British market.
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